Linux Kernel 5.19 is ready

Linus Torvalds announced the release and general availability of Linux Kernel 5.19 on the last day of July. Torvalds stated that the shortlog from release candidate 8, includes nothing really interesting, “A lot of random small stuff.”

The development of this release took one extra week due to the problems while implementing Retbleed vulnerability fixes that affect CPUs on Linux-based operating systems. The final release of Linux Kernel comes with optimizations, improvements, security fixes, and improved hardware support.

What’s new?

Linux Kernel comes with improvements for network drivers for both wireless and wired connections, including a Big TCP support, pureLiFi driver, and WFX WiFi low-power IoT receivers driver. The release also adds user-space support for the MPTCP path manager, wake-on LAN support for ATH11K driver, and RTW89 driver now supports Realtek 8852ce 5 GHz devices.

Also, Linux users with Intel laptops were complaining about the sleep mode, which drained the laptop’s battery faster than it is expected and caused them to run hot. Linux Kernel 5.19 includes changes to fix that issue for devices Skylake through Comet Lake CPUs. In the announcement mail, Linus Torvalds also stated,

    « On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It’s something I’ve been waiting for for a long time, and it’s finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We’ve had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now. »

Direct Rendering Manager subsystem is also improved to support AMD GPUs. Linux Kernel 5.19 also merges an Apple M1 NVMe controller and Apple eFuses driver. A new in-field scan solution is also added to Linux Kernel 5.19 to detect issues in Intel CPUs. Linux Kernel 5.19 also comes with various security improvements, The improved lockdown mode prevents privileged processes from changing kernel memory. It also introduces support for rules in the Landlock security module.

The new and updated drivers now support Raspberry Pi Sense HAT joystick, Mega World controller’s force feedback, ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II, and Google Whiskers touchpad. It also improves Keychron keyboards support.

What’s next?

Linux Kernel 5.19 is now available as a source code but most users will wait for their distribution maintainers to update and release their distro with the latest release. Now that 5.19 is now officially released, the merge window for the next version is now open. However, it seems like it won’t be named 5.20. Linus Torvalds said,

    « Anyway, regardless of all that, this obviously means that the merge window will open tomorrow. But please give this a good test run before you get all excited about a new development kernel.

    I’ll likely call it 6.0 since I’m starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again. »